Thirty years after its initial publication, Don DeLillo’sWhite Noise is still every bit the hilarious, uncannily prescient classic that everyone believed it was. White nailed the whole “America poisoned by reality and the humming glow of computer screens” angle better than almost anyone. For more DeLillo, here’s what its like to re-read White Noise.

Piggybacking off a brief aside in Ian Frazier’snew review of James Agee’sCotton Tenants, Claire Kelleyexplores an odd and intriguing question: was Agee related to Walt Whitman? (Related: Mallory Ortbergon the probability that Whitman did the dirty with Oscar Wilde.)

Why do Americans read so few translated works? A lot of reasons come to mind, but one is that translated books are often the purview of small publishers, who don’t have the same marketing budgets as the larger companies in the industry. At The New Yorker's Currency blog, Vauhini Varalooks at the statistics compiled by Three Percent, a database at the University of Rochester that tracks publications of translated works in the country. Related: Oliver Farry'sinterview with the Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes.